MTA Squabbles Over Hue-Mongous Decision

Grab your Crayola boxes, boys and girls.

They are running out of colors for Los Angeles' expanding Metro transit system. And that has created a political debate involving cross-town college rivals, racial concerns and, of course, money.

There's the Red Line, Blue Line, Green Line, Orange Line and Gold Line. Now officials who are planning a light-rail transit line along Exposition Boulevard need a color for it that riders will remember and route mapmakers can illustrate.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials today are poised to christen the downtown-to-Westside route the "Aqua Line." But it might not come without a fight at the MTA board, where some members favor using the cardinal color at the Exposition Boulevard line's start and aqua at its end.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who sits on the MTA board, favors the name "Expo Line" and the two-toned compromise. The Cardinal Line would run from downtown to Culver City, and the Aqua Line would cover the second phase of the project from Culver City to Santa Monica.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is chairman of the MTA board, dismissed the two-toned talk as the stuff of collegiate rivalry. USC's colors are cardinal and gold, and the Cardinal Line would run past the campus. UCLA's colors are blue and gold, and the Aqua Line would run south of that campus.

"I figure it's a UCLA-USC thing, and I'm the mayor for all the people," Villaraigosa told an MTA executive management and audit committee last week.

"I went to both schools," Burke retorted.

"I worked for 'SC and graduated from UCLA," Villaraigosa responded.

The color-coordination confusion comes as the MTA struggles with mapmaking symbols for its transit system.

In multicultural Los Angeles, naming transit lines after colors is a sensitive task. Transit officials privately said it would be inappropriate to call the Exposition Boulevard line -- which runs through both African American and Latino neighborhoods -- the "Black Line" or "Brown Line."

And, of course, the "White Line" would never show up clearly on a map.

But they have proposed naming the El Monte busway the "Silver Line" since that color was once assigned to the project when it was first constructed. And they have recommended designating the busway that runs down the Harbor Freeway the "Bronze Line" because it connects passengers to various South Bay beach cities where suntans are the norm.